Cloud Storage

Dropbox has been experiencing some service interruptions over the last few days. The company announced yesterday that it was making progress on fixing the issues since the service went down on Friday. That outage was almost completely fixed as of Sunday afternoon according to Dropbox.

Walmart's Vudu online video store has added Intel's "UltraViolet" (UV) content library to its own. The move will expand Vudu viewers' selection to include titles by UV's digital distribution model. The idea here is that it allows for low-cost temporary video access on multiple devices while protecting copyrights for producers.

If you've ever had the need to store terabytes of data and have those accessible to any and all of your devices, then you had probably taken a look at some services like Dropbox and its kin. However, if you are on a tight budget or are quite conscientious about privacy issues, then the Transporter Sync might offer a better choice.

Microsoft last night sent out an email to some of its Windows Phone users informing them of some good news. They will get 20GB of additional SkyDrive storage for one year, in addition to the 7 free GB that SkyDrive users already get. The holiday gift only applies to "Windows Phone Enthusiast Users".

The update from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 hasn’t been smooth for some users. A number of repots have surfaced online from users complaining they are having issues using Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage system after upgrading to Windows 8.1. There are reportedly 120 individual threads on the SkyDrive forum about issues after updated to the latest version of Windows.

A hearty collection of BMW and MINI Cooper vehicles have just joined the cloud music universe with a boost to Amazon Cloud Player starting this month. This addition of Amazon Cloud Player app goodness will allow BMW Apps and MINI Connected equipped vehicles from model year 2011 and forward to partake, just so long as they're working with Amazon Cloud Player for iOS. This service is, indeed, connected between a MINI Cooper or BMW user and his or her iPhone, and iPhone only - for now.

This week the second iteration of the device called Automatica has appeared, this time sporting the ability to connect to the web. While the original Automatica device was as simple as a USB device could be without simply being a dongle, this music-toting machine also connects to the web, allowing you to sync with your online music collection whenever you happen to be parked.

When it comes to taking pictures of family and friends, a huge number of people rely on snapping the pics with their smartphone or tablet and uploading them to Facebook. While Facebook is online and makes for a relatively safe place to store your photos, you should still back up the photos since they often can't be replaced.

Microsoft has added automatic photo upload to its SkyDrive app for iOS, with the new Camera Backup feature pushing shots directly to the cloud once they're snapped. The updated SkyDrive iOS app makes Camera Backup an option, naturally, and the uploads can be set to take place over WiFi and cellular data, or only when you've got a WiFi connection. It's not the only tweak to the software, either.

Dropbox has refreshed its cloud storage software to support multiple accounts, allowing Dropbox for Business users to also access their personal documents from a single app. Not only can users of the company's mobile software switch between files stored in each different account, Dropbox says, but actually browse the combined contents of each cloud store simultaneously, in a single Files tab list.